The Quarter Bin

We were lucky enough to get a few minutes with the legendary comic creator Neal Adams at the New York Comic Con this past weekend. Take the jump to see what was on the man’s mind as we cover creator rights, why there aren’t more social issues tackled in today’s comics and Neal’s next big project (here’s a hint- it’s Batman).

For those who don’t know who Neal Adams is, he and writer Denny O’Neil, a frequent collaborator, redefined the characters Batman, Green Lantern and Green Arrow during their runs in the 1970′s. He’s famous for being very vocal in his support of creator rights in the comic industry. Mr. Adams is also a family man. As we approached the Continuity Studios booth, a photo was displayed prominently on his table proclaiming Neal to be a grandfather again. He also spent time promoting his son’s first sketchbook to anyone who would listen. Below is are the words of a man passionate about his craft, politics and the right to own what is rightfully yours.

Neal, the first question I have to ask what keeps you contributing like you do in comics today? What has stopped you from saying “You know what, I’ve done enough for comics” and made you want to keep doing what you do?

That’s a thought that would never occur to me. I’ve never felt compelled to contribute; I don’t feel it’s my job. You know what happens is that you see something wrong, or you see a hole, you automatically want to fill it, or you automatically want to change it so it’s not wrong.

It’s like… You go into a movie theater, you sit on a toilet seat. [to Sarah] You have to pay attention, now. [Sarah in background: I am! I am!] You sit on a toilet seat, and the toilet seat goes back and forth… now, if you reach back, behind you, there’s two bolts that hold the toilet seat on… Now if you take that butterfly nut and turn it like this, it’ll tighten that bolt… So by the time you finish doing your business, you’ve tightened that seat up, and you can kind of move it around and size it up, and now that toilet seat is nice and firm.

You know in your head if you’ve got any brains that the last 40 people that sat on that toilet seat, it never occurred to them to tighten that bolt. So all the time they’ve been sitting on it, it’s been moving back and forth, worse and worse each time. So what you’ve done is you’ve gone back there and you’ve tightened that thing up so that the thing doesn’t shift and now you feel nice and comfortable. And the next 40 people that sit on that toilet seat are gonna be rewarded by what you did because that seat won’t slide around. But all you did was you reached back and you tightened the bolt, no big deal.

Why did you do it? Well, because you happen to know… that’s how you tighten a toilet seat… If you feel a sense of responsibility toward other people, you know how to do it, it’s just as easy to do it as to not do it.

If you know something is wrong and you know what the solution is… You see somebody cutting up original art. “What are you doing?” “I’m cutting up original art.” “Stop! You’re cutting up original art! It should be returned to the artist.” “Yeah, but that’s got nothing to do with me, I just gotta cut it up.” “Okay… If you cut up another piece of original art, I will come back here and I will hit you in the face very hard. I’ll break something. I just want you to know that. I’ll hit you. So don’t cut up any more art.”

Now, you only said that. You’re not gonna hit the guy. But you want him to feel the fear of God. So that he doesn’t cut up any more art. It’s worth it for him to be a little bit worried about you so that he doesn’t cut up the art…The guy respects that. I’m never gonna do it.

Now, if you go and talk to somebody about it and say “Well, all this art is being destroyed.” “Oh, that’s too bad.”… “Okay, let me put this another way. If I see another piece of artwork destroyed, I won’t do any more work for DC Comics.” “Oh, wait a minute! Hold on, hold on! We’ll discuss this, no, I think we can do something about this.”

So it’s sort of like tightening the nut on your toilet seat, you see? You know you need to tighten the nut, and you try to stop things from going from bad to worse, and then you kind of move things along. You don’t get on a white horse and ride through town and shoot things up and kill the villains. You just kind of pressure it and make it do better.

I’m doing a thing for a woman who was in a concentration camp… She was in Auschwitz, and she was a teenage girl and she accompanied her mother, she insisted on accompanying her mother, who was a prisoner of war, to Auschwitz because she didn’t want her mother to be alone. She didn’t know that they were gonna kill her there. She just wanted to be with her mom.

So they went to Auschwitz, and a guy named Menghella, very bad person who committed atrocities on people for the sake of proving that the Aryan race was better than everybody else, discovered that she was a young art student because she was painting Snow White and the Seven Dwarves on the wall of one of the barracks that held children who were unhappy who were gonna be killed. But this would temporarily make them happier because they could see Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

Menghella found out about this person and had her brought to him and said, “Since you paint, what I want you to do is, I’m gonna have gypsies brought in here. The photographs I’m taking doesn’t show their skin texture. So I need to see that because I’m trying to make a point about skin texture and inferior races and all of that. So I want you to paint them.” And so she did, and she said “I will do it, but I don’t want my mother killed. Either I will do it to keep my mother alive, or I will throw myself under the electric fence outside.” Menghella believed her and kept her and her mother alive. She kept as many of these gypsies alive as she could by taking a long time to do the paintings, but she got to see a lot of these operations that Menghella did, and even painted some of them.

As the war started to wind down and the allies came in, they were put on a death march from Auschwitz to another camp and they survived, she and her mother, and they got out. She came to America, went to California, worked for the animation companies, because that’s what she loved to do, and she’s 86 years old now. Auschwitz Museum recently purchased five of her paintings from somebody. She contacted them and said, “I would like to have my paintings back.” They said no. She said, “But they’re my paintings!” They said, “Are they really?”

Now, something like that is pretty clear, in my view. If she fucking wants to wipe her ass with them, they should be returned to her. So I’m drawing a little story and I’m gonna see that it gets published in places to force the museum to return them to her. Will they return it? Some people might say no, maybe they won’t. I don’t think they’ll take that press, I think they’ll return it. But you have to put pressure on people like that. What do I think the best pressure in this case is? To do a little five-page story that might appear in the newspapers, drawn by Neal Adams, because I have enough of a reputation that people might see that. We’ve had petitions go to the museums in Auschwitz, and none of them have worked. So I’m taking the next step. Is it important for me to do this? Should I do this? The question really is, how can I not? Does that answer your question?

Yeah, that definitely answers the question! Now, taking from your reputation as—

An asshole.

–You’ve had very many runs on a lot of different comics that have influenced a lot of people today.

One of them seems to be turning into a movie, I guess Dead Man is next, and then Green Lantern/Green Arrow.

Well, that’s actually where I was going with this. When you and Denny O’Neil were working on Green Lantern/Green Arrow, a lot of your comic heroes took on big social issues… The first time around, did you think that those two people would be the only characters around that you find have that kind of social voice in comics?

Um, no, I thought other people would tackle some of those things. What you have to remember is, it’s actually not an easy job, because you have to—first of all, you have to know stuff. Then after you know it, the question is does it fall into comic book stuff? For example, in the last 8 years, why haven’t I seen more comic books against Mr. Bush, who is a total royal asshole? I don’t know, it should have been done.

When I did Green Lantern/Green Arrow, we attacked Spirow Agnew, who was a total fucking asshole. We even took some jabs at Nixon in that same book. Rather heavy jabs, heavy-handed jabs, so heavy that the governor of Florida wrote a letter to DC comics and said “If you ever do that again, I will see that your books are not distributed in Florida.” It is significant to know what’s bad, to be right, which is not so easy, and to make a statement, and to try even in that statement to be a little ambivalent, to not make judgments, but to simply point things out.

Now, it’s only now that we see how bad this war that we’re in is. It’s only now that we see how destructive for our economy this war has been. It’s only now that we see that. It would have been advantageous for somebody to have seen it before now and tried to turn it. Because now it’s sort of like, so obvious. It’s hard to know that. It’s really hard to know that.

For example, Denny O’Neil and I were asked to write a synopsis for a drug book for DC comics that New York State would distribute to the schools… But Denny was a newspaper reporter and I was a liberal asshole. So our investigations would cause us to write a book a little bit different than “Just Say No”. Our books would be a little bit more sympathetic to the drug addicts to try to get people to understand why addiction happens.

So Denny wrote a synopsis, and I wrote a synopsis, and they turned both of them down. They turned both of them down, in my opinion, because they were telling just a little bit too much of the truth. So we didn’t get to do this project because stepping up to people who get involved in social issues is not exactly the same as fucking dealing with them, because we then come off as raving lunatics. If we do it off by ourselves and then suddenly the news gets it and they say “Oh, this is good, this is interesting”, that’s different than actually hiring us to do a book on drug addiction. If you hire those guys, those crazy people, they might actually tell the truth, and then you’d be sponsoring it. Not exactly the same.

If somebody in comics recognized what a disaster Iraq is, and did a book on it, they wouldn’t want that. I’ll give you an example. I did a cover that I was going to give to DC comics. It was a Superman cover… He was clearly in an Arab country. In the foreground was a little kid, clearly an Arab kid, holding a dog. Superman was in front of him between him and an explosion in the background, protecting him with his cape. So in the foreground we have him with the dog, which by the way was a mistake because Arabs don’t like dogs, and Superman is protecting the kid, and behind them it’s an explosion, and clearly Superman is saving the child, saving an Arab child from an explosion.

I offered it to DC comics, and I said “I think this would make a great cover, and I think somebody ought to write a story about Superman protecting people from dying. This happened to be some Arab kid.” Their first response was, “Oh, we should give it to an editor and do that.” The second response was, “Oh, maybe we won’t be doing that.” Now, between you, me, and the fencepost, Superman saving an Arab kid from an explosion? A non-denominational explosion? Pretty innocent. “Well, we don’t wanna get Superman involved in Iraq, saving Arabs from explosions, because that might imply something.” So that cover has never been used, it’s in a drawer in my studio as an example of what doesn’t happen when you do try to make a statement.

Lastly, it’s been said that every comic is somebody’s first. So—

Somebody’s first?

Yeah, every comic is somebody’s first, you know—

I think you made that up.

I did, I made it up. I’m trademarking it right now.

I never heard that!

You’ve never heard that?

[Some guy waiting to have his art critiqued by Neal: “To be honest, I’ve heard that.”]

You know what, I’ll go with it.

Okay. So if every comic is somebody’s first, which of your comics do you want to be somebody’s first?

The one I’m working on now.

What are you working on right now?

Well, it’s a caped guy with a funny mask and he’s got this long cape and ears. It’s a series of graphic novels, 6 in number, and that would be what I’d want ’em to read first. If it were older, I’d want them to read Superman vs. Muhammad Ali. In my opinion, the best comic book ever done. And I usually don’t have opinions like that, and it’s just an opinion, but that comic book is aces.

Superman vs. Muhammad Ali. Aces.

There you have it folks. Hopefully we’ll be able to have another conversation with Mr. Adams when the new Batman book he alludes to comes out. Stay tuned to TheQuarterbin.com for more developments in this and many more stories.